This book studies how topography, the art of describing local space and place, developed literary and visual form in early modern France. Arguing for a “new poetics of space” ranging throughout ...
More

This book studies how topography, the art of describing local space and place, developed literary and visual form in early modern France. Arguing for a “new poetics of space” ranging throughout French Renaissance poetry, prose, and cartography, this book performs dazzling readings of maps, woodcuts, and poems to plot a topographical shift in the late Renaissance in which space, subjectivity, and politics fall into crisis. It charts the paradox of a period whose demarcation of national space through cartography is rendered unstable by an ambient world of printed writing. This tension, the book demonstrates, cuts through literature and graphic matter of various shapes and forms—hybrid genres that include the comic novel, the emblem-book, the eclogue, sonnets, and the personal essay. The book differs from historical treatments of spatial invention through the book’s argument that the topographic sensibility is one in which the ocular faculty, vital to the description of locale, is endowed with tact and touch.Less

An Errant Eye : Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France

Tom Conley

Published in print: 2011-01-29

This book studies how topography, the art of describing local space and place, developed literary and visual form in early modern France. Arguing for a “new poetics of space” ranging throughout French Renaissance poetry, prose, and cartography, this book performs dazzling readings of maps, woodcuts, and poems to plot a topographical shift in the late Renaissance in which space, subjectivity, and politics fall into crisis. It charts the paradox of a period whose demarcation of national space through cartography is rendered unstable by an ambient world of printed writing. This tension, the book demonstrates, cuts through literature and graphic matter of various shapes and forms—hybrid genres that include the comic novel, the emblem-book, the eclogue, sonnets, and the personal essay. The book differs from historical treatments of spatial invention through the book’s argument that the topographic sensibility is one in which the ocular faculty, vital to the description of locale, is endowed with tact and touch.